Review: “Death with Interruptions”.

…Saramago skewers the flailing reactions of each of these institutions mercilessly and slyly, as an underground “maphia” emerges to see to the transport of the elderly and infirm across the border, at which point they promptly expire, and before long the maphia and government find themselves working together. The church veers back and forth between explanations for the lack of death. The philosophers spin their wheels in the mud. When Saramago has this country’s citizens wondering how, at a time with death has completely ceased, “what the hell is going on with the government, who have so far given not the slightest sign of life”—it seems like an instantly universal truism about government’s common problems, regardless of the problem at hand…